Tag Archives: MacBook Pro

A few months ago I had to get a new laptop as my old one was becoming a pain in the ass to use. It was taking ages to boot up, certain programs were slow to use as were my browsers, so I had to replace it. When I bought my MacBook Pro to replace it, I had to decide what model I wanted to buy and what my options were when it came to buying Microsoft Office. I decided to get the MacBook Pro with 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive) storage as I knew that getting the Office 365 yearly subscription I would get 1 Terabyte of free cloud storage.

Once I had setup my new laptop I realised that I was now facing a problem that most laptop buyers will face which is cloud storage issues. When I was told that I would get 1 Terabyte of cloud storage with my Office 365 yearly subscription, that’s what I expected to get. What I got in the end is something that worked via syncing, which makes exact copies of files and folders on your computer.

When your cloud storage works via syncing it copies files from your computer into the cloud but there is one important thing to note, any files that you only have on the cloud will be deleted. This is because when exact copies of your files and folders are made, all the files that are not available offline on your computer will be deleted. This to me defeats the purpose of cloud storage as if you have limited offline storage you may want to move some of your files and folders online to be stored securely in the cloud.

If you manage to get cloud storage that does not work via syncing be careful to read their terms and conditions, as you may suddenly find your cloud storage is being reduced or even worse they may decide to close it down for alleged misuses. The missuses could include you storing too much data, even though you have unlimited storage and you will be wondering how is this a misuse? Well in the small print of their terms and conditions they will outline their fair usage policy and the chances are that it won’t be too hard for you to breach them.

You may also find that your cloud storage provider might suddenly shut down and just because they have been in business for so many years does not mean they still will be. You might also find out that their data centres are in a country which is politically unstable or prone to bad weather such as heavy rain or hurricane’s.

In the end there was only solution for me and that was to use a local and also private cloud drive. So after researching what would suit my needs, I decided to buy the LaCie Porsche Design 1TB USB 3.0 Portable 2.5 inch External Hard Drive for PC and Mac which is pictured below.

I partioned the Lacie drive so that 300 GB would be used to store a bootable backup of my MacBook pro’s SSD and the remaining 700 GB would be used to do what proper cloud storage should do and that is store files that I wished to move from my SSD.

The most important thing that cloud storage must give you is a safe and secure environment to store your files and folders and the Lacie gives me this and because I am the only person using it, I can store it in a safe secure place. So if you are planning to use cloud storage to keep copies of some of your computers files and folders, do your research like I did and you may end up following my lead by using local and also private cloud drive.